Sunday, 17 July 2016

The Secret Agent - BBC 1 TV review

The Secret Agent, starring Toby Jones and based on Joseph Conrad's novel, got off to a fine start on BBC 1 tonight. The book is my favourite work by Conrad (I first encountered him through his short stories, which were a set book for O-Level, but thankfully that didn't put me off). And the TV adaptation is very resonant in these uncertain times, coming to the screen so soon after the horrific events in Nice and all the other terrorist atrocities that have shaken the world in recent months.

It's easy to forget that, even at the time the story was written, it was a historical piece, set in the late 1880s, twenty years before publication. Perhaps this helped Conrad to achieve a sort of perspective on the mixed motives and complex behaviours of those involved with anarchist outrages at the time. Episode one reminded us that the warped thinking that leads people to kill others in pursuit of some vague, or even nonsensical political goal, is nothing new. Conrad tells us something about human nature, and so does Tony Marchant's screenplay.

Jones plays Verloc, who runs a (surprisingly unsuccessful, I'd have thought) sex shop catering for dodgy MPs and vicars in the heart of Soho. He's aided and abetted by his wife Winnie, played by Vicky McClure; she's prepared to turn a blind eye to his behaviour, and the revolutionary claptrap he and his friends spout because, on balance, Verloc is a good husband who takes care of her.

But Verloc is in a mess. He works an agent for the Russian government, who take a hard view of revolutionaries, and also dabbles in work as an informer for Scotland Yard. Fear and financial pressure are leading him into very dangerous territory with a gang of anarchists who are as unstable as the bombs they make. It's gripping, but also chilling. Not exactly good escapism, given the wretched things happening right now in real life, but good television.,

5 comments:

Just planning to re-read the book before watching this (which i clearly need to do as I have no memory of his running a sex shop ...) Jones sounds like really interesting casting to me. The topicality just seems inescapable even had it been shown last year - one desperately hopes, against all precedent, that it won't feel the same in a year's time

I, too, adore this book...and love the way both Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana) and John le Carre (The Tailor of Panama) reworked the main elements of the plot (it's not plagiarism if it's an "homage", right?) in their own, inimitable ways :-)

About Me

I've published eighteen crime novels, including series set in Liverpool and the Lake District, and received the Poirot Award recently for my contribution to the crime genre. I've won the CWA Short Story Dagger and CWA Margery Allingham Prize, and The Golden Age of Murder earned the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity, and H.R.F.Keating awards. I am consultant for the British Library's Classic Crime series, and author of The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books. I'm Chair of the CWA and President of the Detection Club. I've edited thirty anthologies, published about sixty short stories, and written seven other non-fiction books..